> If driving on the road suddenly makes car trips possible, then I'd say that the road is indeed designed to make things more difficult for those not driving on the road.
This is obviously silly, because the road makes car travel easier, not harder. Schemes like Horizon Europe make scientific research easier in similar ways.
For funding agencies to give money to universities, they and the univerisities have to make a whole bunch of critical but basically arbitrary decisions about how to handle the impedance mismatch between their respective organisations' internal finance procedures. Doing this over and over is wasteful of time and effort, and one benefit of big cross-national research funds like this is that a university can make these decisions once, and then don't have to do it over and over again, once for each funding agency in Europe.
Also, generous cooperation is an important part of geopolitics. Cooperation is how you convince your neighbors you are an ally rather than a threat.